CLAYTON, Mo. — The march of clergy members, black and white and demanding a full investigation into police actions in St. Louis County, wound from the well-groomed and highly regarded high school, past the curious onlookers out for sushi or Starbucks, and finally to the county prosecutor’s office.

Wednesday was the first day that demonstrations reached Clayton, the affluent and mostly white county seat, 20 minutes and a million miles away from Ferguson, where 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death on Aug. 9 and protesters and the police have clashed violently in the streets. Here in Clayton, where Mr. Brown’s mother works at a gourmet grocer, and throughout the patchwork of largely white suburbs that curl around St Louis to the west and south, people have watched the events in Ferguson with compassion, outrage and indifference, some with sympathy, some with contempt.

Even among those who are more sympathetic to the concerns of the protesters, there is a striking language gap, with whites asking why demonstrators are not letting the justice system simply do its work and blacks saying the way the system works is exactly the problem.

“As far as justice and peace, we need to have it, of course,” said Arlene Rosengarten, who watched the march from farther up the sidewalk. “But we need to make sure there’s real justice and not jump the gun just because everybody’s angry. I think this is just setting a bad precedent.”

Black demonstrators on the streets of Ferguson, their sympathizers nationally and even Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. have spoken over the past nearly two weeks of routine police harassment and life under a constant and unwarranted cloud of suspicion. They point to yawning economic inequities, the balkanized and segregated geography of St. Louis County and a justice system they say has always been antagonistic.

Image

“As far as justice and peace, we need to have it,” said Arlene Rosengarten, seated right. But she called protests “a bad precedent.”CreditAdrees Latif/Reuters

“My daddy told me to watch out, even when I was little,” said a young black man at the Ferguson protests who, like many here, gave his name as Mike Brown and talked of routinely being stopped by the police. “We’re just fed up.”

Whites may not all echo the thoughts of Ferguson’s mayor, James Knowles, who is white and who insisted in an interview on MSNBC that there was no racial divide in his city. But talk of larger systemic injustice meets with plenty of skepticism.

“A lot of them have gotten better than fair shakes,” said Mark Johnston, a 61-year-old white merchandiser who was on the job on Thursday in Mehlville, in the mostly white and working-class southern reaches of St. Louis County. While expressing sympathy for the Brown family, he said of the events that have unfolded since the shooting — the protests, the looting, the cries of injustice — “I think it’s a crock of stuff, myself.”

Many share Mr. Johnston’s view of the protests as a cynical exercise in politics and media manipulation. Jeff Heydt, who is white and watched the protest in Ferguson on Tuesday, said he was initially troubled by the shooting. But now, he said, he sees the protests as “an opportunity to reinvolve people in the political process who were disappointed by Obama.”

Possibly the most widely held sentiment among whites is the hope that it all simply goes away. “I feel for everyone involved,” said Shannon Shaw, a jeweler in Mehlville. But, she added, “I think the protesters just need to go home.”

Still, the events of the last two weeks have left many whites perplexed, not only as to how this police shooting could ignite a neighborhood like a tinderbox, but that there was a tinderbox at all.

“It was eye-opening to me,” said Jim McLaughlin, the former mayor of Pasadena Hills, a small, majority-black city just south of Ferguson. That some longtime black friends of his were so pessimistic about the justice system came as a surprise.

“We interact together, we have a good time together, we integrate, but we never talk about these things,” he said. “I think the perspective of a lot of white people is not really thinking that these feelings are sitting out there. And maybe in the black community they’re not only thinking about them, they’re wondering why we’re not talking about them.”

Even some of the whites who most heartily rejected the idea of systemic injustice nonetheless said that the conflagration in Ferguson arose out of the way St. Louis neighborhoods grew and changed in stark racial patterns.

In interview after interview, people spoke of white flight from personal experience, ticking off their moves from neighborhood to neighborhood across the northern part of the county as if escaping a flood.

“They always want to stir up to trouble, the blacks,” said David Goad, 64, a retired movie projector operator who lives in a neighborhood bordering Ferguson. “I grew up around blacks, so I know how they are,” he said. “That’s why we had to get out in 1962, because it was getting so bad.”

This was not an uncommon sentiment. But it was not universal.

Andrew Tetzlaff, 52, has been coming to the protests in Ferguson from his home in nearby Hazelwood to show his solidarity with the demonstrators. He is not alone among local whites who march on West Florissant Avenue, nor among a significant number of local whites who have expressed sympathy with the protesters’ concerns and outrage at the actions of the police.

But he still feels that too few whites in St. Louis County understand the realities of black life, for the most part, he says, because they fled from racially mixed neighborhoods.

“My wife and I have been literally present to see young black kids getting hassled for no reason at all,” Mr. Teztlaff said. “In their experience,” he said of other whites, “these things don’t happen with cops. But they moved away from these mixed communities years ago. Those of us who didn’t, we’re still aware.”

The continuing turmoil in Ferguson is prompting a reluctant re-evaluation of St. Louis and its self-image, even among its biggest boosters. That group would include Thomas Schlafly, a lawyer and the chairman of the board of the Saint Louis Brewery.

“Maybe it was my blinders, but if you had said to me three weeks ago that the world would be looking at conflagrations in Gaza, Ukraine and Ferguson, I would have been utterly bewildered,” he said. He is still puzzled, he said.

He remembers watching the riots in Washington after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in 1968. While East St. Louis had exploded in a race riot in 1917, the unrest of the 1960s largely bypassed St. Louis, a point Mr. Schlafly brought up with some civic pride. Watching Ferguson has made him question how accurate that conception of St. Louis and the surrounding area really was.

“Probably I shouldn’t be that astonished that it was in St. Louis,” he said. “Maybe it could have been anywhere.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Among Whites, Protests Stir a Range of Emotions and a Lot of Perplexity. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe